I spent the early part of January this year in Sweden. This is not something I would generally recommend doing. The cold isn’t the main thing, although it is certainly cold. The problem is the dark. Sweden is a beautiful country, but you wouldn’t know it for half the year.
I lived in Stockholm in 2017 and 2018, with my then boyfriend. I moved there with him and for him – he had got on a master’s programme in the city and I was trying to be a writer while doing odd jobs, both things I could do in Sweden. I had never lived abroad and wanted to. At first, it was difficult. I had no friends, I missed home, and without colleagues or fellow students to mingle with, I was lonely.
It got good, though. It got really good. I made great friends, grew to love our little flat and running around the island of Södermalm, past the little boats tied up along the shore, jumping in the water when I felt brave, learning enough Swedish to tune into conversations in the street. I loved living there, and I loved living there with him. We moved back to London once his course was finished; then the pandemic came and we broke up in the spring of 2022, after which he moved back to Stockholm for a few months. It was a bad breakup, with which I won’t bore you too much. I was very unhappy for a time.
I was surprised to find that one of the things that hurt the most was that I felt as if I would never be able to return to Sweden, a country that neither of us had even visited before we lived there together, and which he had now de facto claimed as his territory by going back without me. I felt then, and still do, that my time living there improved me as a person. The place had become a part of who I was. Even before we broke up, I found going back to Sweden so heartwarming it made me sad. My life in Stockholm had been an exciting and less complicated time in my life. At the end of another trip I made there in early 2022, right before the breakup, I texted him: “Do you ever find nostalgia so strong it’s almost unbearable?” He knew what I meant.
But I did go back, this past January. I had to go because I needed to interview some people for an article, and also because I had been given a grant by The Society of Authors to research my second novel in Kiruna, a small city in the Arctic Circle. I wasn’t so worried about going to Kiruna. We’d never made it up that far on our travels around the country. But the interviews were in Stockholm, and I didn’t want to be in that city, walking through the scenery that formed the backdrop of our relationship every day. I was dreading the trip, even as I understood that I was very lucky to be able to take it.
I stayed in Stockholm with a friend, August, who is also incurably sentimental. But it was hard. On the first day I cried, on the second day I cried, on the third day my friend and I both cried because we were drunk and it’s nice to cry together sometimes. Everywhere I went, memories that I hadn’t allowed myself to recall since the breakup presented themselves.
But it got easier each day I was there, as I overwrote the map of the city with new experiences that only had me in them. I ate a good meal alone in a Spanish restaurant. I did my own grocery shopping, went to galleries by myself and left when I wanted to leave. It gave me hope that it’s possible to take things with you, even as you have to leave others behind. It had felt as though the six years of my life I shared with another person were lost to me, because he had taken them with him. But that turned out not to be true. We lived in Sweden, yes, but I was there the whole time. I lived there, too.
Then August and I took a sleeper train to Kiruna. In January, there is almost no daylight there and it is significantly below freezing. In some ways the trip was a bust. We didn’t see the northern lights, the iron mine that I wanted to visit was closed, as was the hotel made of ice, and we were staying in a large but empty Airbnb in a dead-end corner of town. One night, in the near-deserted main room of one of Kiruna’s few bars, part of a chain of replica English pubs called The Bishops Arms, August told me that they had turned down a free holiday to Bali, laid on by a rich friend, in order to ensure I didn’t make this trip on my own. I am in pain with gratitude thinking about this even now. So that’s another thing about going to Sweden that gave me a reason to feel hopeful, as trite as it will inevitably sound. It was also a reminder that I have good friends. Something I never lost, and am lucky not to feel at risk of losing.
• Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist based in London
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